Racial Segregation and Southern Lynching
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NBER WORKING PAPER SERIES RACIAL SEGREGATION AND SOUTHERN LYNCHING Lisa D. Cook Trevon D. Logan John M. Parman Working Paper 23813 http://www.nber.org/papers/w23813 NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138 September 2017 We thank Terry-Ann Craigie, Brendan Nyhan, Suresh Naidu, Richard H. Steckel, Stewart Tolnay, participants at the Cliometric Society, Population Association of America, and ASSA Annual Meetings and seminar audiences at Queens University, University of Montreal, Dartmouth, and Ohio University for suggestions on this project. Jacob D. Ginsberg, Terry L. Pack, and Stephen Prifti provided excellent research assistance. The usual disclaimer applies. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peer-reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications. © 2017 by Lisa D. Cook, Trevon D. Logan, and John M. Parman. All rights reserved. Short sections of text, not to exceed two paragraphs, may be quoted without explicit permission provided that full credit, including © notice, is given to the source. Racial Segregation and Southern Lynching Lisa D. Cook, Trevon D. Logan, and John M. Parman NBER Working Paper No. 23813 September 2017 JEL No. I1,J1,N3 ABSTRACT The literature on ethnic fractionalization and conflict has not been extended to the American past. In particular, the empirical relationship between racial residential segregation and lynching is unknown. The existing economic, social, and political theories of lynching contain hypotheses about the relationship between racial segregation and racial violence, consistent with theories of social conflict. Since Southern lynching occurred in rural and urban areas, traditional urban measures of racial segregation cannot be used to estimate the relationship. We use a newly developed household-level measure of residential segregation (Logan and Parman 2017), which can distinguish between racial homogeneity of a location and the tendency to racially segregate, to estimate the correlation between racial segregation and lynching in the southern counties of the United States. We find that conditional on racial composition, racially segregated counties were much more likely to experience lynchings. Consistent with the hypothesis that segregation is related to interracial violence, we find that segregation is highly correlated with African American lynching, but uncorrelated with white lynching. These results extend the analysis of racial/ethnic conflict into the past and show that the effects of social interactions and interracial proximity in rural areas are as important as those in urban areas. Lisa D. Cook John M. Parman Department of Economics Department of Economics Michigan State University P.O. Box 8795 110 Marshall-Adams Hall College of William and Mary East Lansing, MI 48824 Williamsburg, VA 23187 [email protected] and NBER [email protected] Trevon D. Logan The Ohio State University 410 Arps Hall 1945 N. High Street Columbus, OH 43210 and NBER [email protected] “Our country’s national crime is lynching. It is not the creature of an hour, the sudden outburst of uncontrolled fury, or the unspeakable brutality of an insane mob.” - Ida B. Wells, Lynch Law in America (1900) 1. Introduction A growing literature has documented both the link between ethnic diversity and conflict (Abadie and Gardeazabal, 2003; Fearon and Laitin, 2003; Collier and Hoeffler, 2004; Collier and Rohner, 2008; Balcells et al., 2016; Scacco and Warren, 2016) and the subsequent effects of that conflict on growth. Ethnic fractionalization is often tied to ethnic conflict that hinders economic development. While violent conflict is a prominent theme in the literature on ethnic fractionalization in developing countries, economics research on the United States has focused more on the relationships between racial/ethnic diversity, the provision of public goods, and the growth of American cities. The relationship between diversity, trust and economic performance within the United States is mixed. Alesina, Baqir, and Easterly (1999) show that public goods provision is inversely associated with ethnic fractionalization in U.S. cities. Alesina and La Ferrara (2005) demonstrate that increases in ethnic diversity are associated with lower growth rates, consistent with the Costa and Kahn (2003) finding that increasing community heterogeneity is associated with declining levels of social capital in the United States. Recent research also shows that proximity to racial minorities caused higher voter turnout and more conservative voting by whites in US cities (Enos, 2016). Other studies, however, point to economic benefits of diversity in urban areas (Ottaviano and Peri 2006). While the economics literature has focused on relationships between racial diversity and public goods provision in the United States, there are large sociology and criminology literatures on the links between segregation and violence in urban areas. Increases in residential segregation tend to increase levels of violent crimes including homicides in both white and nonwhite neighborhoods, although the impacts are greater for black and Hispanic neighborhoods (Krivo, Peterson, and Kuhl 2009). The crimes are typically acts of intraracial violence. This literature points to geographical isolation and the concentration of disadvantage as drivers of this relationship between segregation and violence (Peterson and Krivo 1993; Shihadeh and Flynn 1996; Litwack, 1998; Peterson and Krivo 1999). In this respect, these studies build on the large literature tracing the 2 historical development of segregation and the concentration of poverty in American cities (Massey and Denton 1993; Wilson 2011). The history of the role of segregation in ethnic and racial violence in the American past has not been extended to rural areas. Diversity and ethnic tensions in the United States could influence American society not just through the modern political and economic processes in cities highlighted by Alesina, Baqir, and Easterly (1999) and Alesina and La Ferrara (2005) or the intraracial violence studied by Krivo, Peterson, and Kuhl (2009) and others. It could also have impacts through the lingering effects of interracial violence more directly related to the literature on ethnic fractionalization and ethnic conflict. Historically, this violence was particularly concentrated in America’s rural communities, areas that continue to show complicated links between anti-minority attitudes, political attitudes, and intergroup conflict.5 A growing literature is uncovering links between past violence specifically in the South and modern outcomes, with historical lynchings correlated with modern homicide rates, lack of compliance with hate laws, and urban segregation patterns (Messner, Baller, and Zevenbergen 2005; King, Messner, and Baller 2009; DeFina and Hannon 2011). The shadow cast by historical racial violence could be large and understanding it requires answering the open question of how historical violence was related to historical fractionalization in both urban and rural communities. Our purpose in this paper is to investigate the historical link between ethnic diversity and violent conflict within the United States, examining whether residential segregation prevented or contributed to the likelihood of lynchings in South, where interracial conflict was at its most extreme and where conflict was spread over rural and urban areas. We analyze whether familiarity bred tolerance or contempt between white and black individuals. The existing social, political, economic, and demographic theories of lynching explicitly hinge on interactions between whites and African Americans over particular spheres of social life. One important missing factor, which would arguably be related to all of the spheres, is residential racial segregation. The degree to which whites and African Americans perceived themselves to be in competition with one another over status, economic opportunities, or political power would be 5See, for example, Tope, Pickett, and Chiricos (2015) on anti-minority attitudes and political affiliation in rural communities, Kimmel and Ferber (2000) on racism and the rise of rural militia groups, and Archaya et al. (2016) for long-standing political preferences in rural communities. 3 related to how, or if, they interacted with one another. A key issue in analyzing the American past is that racial violence was not solely concentrated in densely populated urban areas, but was widespread. As such, analysis of the relationship between fractionalization and conflict requires a comprehensive measure of fractionalization. Although intuitively important, it has been difficult to empirically analyze the relationship between residential segregation and lynching. The standard approach in the literature is to use the proportion black in a county. Yet, proportion black tells us little about residential location and segregation, which could occur with large or small African American populations. More generally, the literature on ethnic fractionalization, conflict and economic development has typically employed fragmentation indices which are a function of the population shares of each ethnic group. They measure the probability that two randomly chosen individuals in an area are of different races